Vampirus (Book 1) (3 page)

The scientists said this whole idea was something of an outgrowth from the theory of Panspermia
, which said that life on this planet was originally seeded by extraterrestrial microbes in the form of bacterial spores.

Very interesting stuff, Luke thought as he watched.

They opened the lines and got quite a few callers. Some were just the typical nuts that liked to hear themselves on TV, but one was an anthropologist who asked them if they were aware that most of the great pandemics of history were also times of fervid vampire hysteria. Which, he said, wasn’t surprising because during a plague people became terrified of the dead and it was one of the few instances where the dead actually
could
hurt you. The scientists thought that was very interesting given all the crazy nonsense about the walking dead being talked about on the Internet.

With that new angle, the intrepid scientists gave the virus a name:
Vampirus,
which worked not only from a folkloric perspective but also from the perspective of the nature of viruses themselves: they are parasitic, draining and destroying their hosts while replicating themselves.

The scientists were half-joking…but Luke could see something very grim and set about their mouths that was miles from humor. Regardless, within a matter of hours the whole Vampirus thing went…well, viral, and w
as the hot buzz all over the web.

8

Sonja and Megan were slipping away and he was powerless to do anything about it. They
slept almost all of the time and sitting there, watching them, pulled out his heart and squeezed it dry so he would make himself walk away before he lost his mind. He took to enjoying minor diversions like washing floors and re-varnishing chairs in the basement. Sometimes he’d cook for them, making stews and soups. He had no appetite and he’d dropped nearly twenty-five pounds by that point. Neither his wife nor his daughter would eat as the days rolled by, and so he’d either freeze what he made or throw it out. But he hated doing that. He’d grown up on a farm in Sawyer County and wasting food was like an unpardonable sin. Whenever he did it, he could feel his mother’s eyes burning at his back.
There’s people starving in Africa, you know.

Sonja wouldn
’t have approved either.

She
loved her kitchen and Luke tried to keep it in a manner she’d approve of. Cookbooks were arranged by subject. Pot holders hung just so. Towels on the rod, not on the counter. He kept the floor clean and the countertops sparkling. He cleaned so much his hands smelled like Pine-Sol.

When Sonja was in the kitchen she always played the radio but he couldn
’t bear to listen to it. There was very little in the way of music these days. Mostly it was one bulletin after the other from the Pentagon, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, local stuff from Civil Defense and the police. All of it, depressing.

In the kitchen, when he wasn
’t scrubbing or cooking, the silence would be immense and if he listened hard enough he could almost hear Sonja singing and humming. When that happened, he would rush outside to catch his breath.

9

Rats.

There were rats everywhere.

On
Main Street, he saw a pack of them in the broad daylight. He pulled over and stared at them with a slowly dawning horror.

He knew there were rats in
Wakefield just as there were rats in every other city in Wisconsin and the world for that matter. Where men set up their towns and hovels, the rats invariably came. Probably the only species that thrived as the human population escalated and wild habitats were decimated.

In Wakefield, before they closed the old dump out on Hollow Creek Road—this was essentially an
“open pit” type of dump where everything was burned in immense pyres—you could drive out there at night and your headlights would reflect eyes, hundreds of beady eyes, so many that you’d think twice about getting out of your car. They closed the dump back in the 1980’s, but before Luke’s old man died he had quite a few stories about the place. He was a cop for thirty years and back in the ‘50’s, he said, he and some of the other young cops would go out there at night and shoot rats for target practice. He said some of them were as big as cats.

Luke himself had never doubted that for a moment.

He’d been with Public Works for fifteen years and knew for a fact that there were rats down in the sewers. And some of them were quite large. About the time he started working there, the problem had reached a zenith of sorts. The sewer workers were reporting droppings everywhere and more than one encounter with the subterranean rodents. A couple guys had actually been bitten and refused to go down again until something was done. Poisoned baits were set out and, lo and behold, they worked: there were dead rats below and even some above that had crawled out of rainwater drains to die in the streets vomiting foam. The next step was cleaning out the dead ones and being that he was a Fucking New Guy, he pulled it.

It was quite a job.

There were five or six intersecting main drain lines that ran beneath the city. These were big enough to walk in. Feeding off of them was an elaborate system of secondary drains that you could only crawl through on your hands and knees. The dankness and moldering stink were nearly unbearable in these tunnels, which were close and suffocating.  But to crawl into them to drag out dead rats?  What a job. It took nearly a week to clear out the poisoned ones and in the end they filled over forty twenty-five gallon drums with dead rats—which were then very unceremoniously dumped into the backs of garbage trucks by Ronny Hazek and the other tailgunners and cycled through with a sound of crunching bones and pulping bodies.

There was still a picture hanging in the city garage of Ronny standing next to barrels of dead rats, grinning as he held up two tomcat-sized rodents by the tails like a happy hunter (in the background, leaning up against the garbage truck was a very dirty and dour Luke Barrows who looked like he
’d just crawled through the belly of hell).

To this day, Luke still had claustrophobic nightmares about being lost in the sewers and he had an absolute aversion to rats. So when he saw them on
Main Street that day, he got a cold chill. He could almost smell the dankness of the pipes again.

The rats came out of a dead-end alley on
Warehouse Street and Main and filtered down through an open basement window in the old Montgomery Wards building, which had been vacant for ten years or more. Place was probably swarming with them. People were saying that many of the old buildings were absolutely infested and that hordes of rats welled up through the sewer gratings at night.

But until he saw them, Luke hadn
’t believed it.

There was so much bullshit flying around it was hard to know what to believe.

A lot of stores were closed up and down Main, very few people in the streets. The Christmas decorations looked out of place, nostalgic and antiquated like relics from a long ago past. Luke stepped out of his truck, feeling the bite of December and remembering Christmases from long ago when he was a kid. And as he did that—standing on the street corner with all those forlorn decorations in the windows and the limp wreaths dangling from street poles—he stared down the empty streets and was hit,
floored,
by the absurdity of the situation. That everything, all that mankind had fought and strived for and believed in, was being destroyed by a fucking bug that you couldn’t even see.

He leaned up against a streetlamp and laughed.

He only stopped when he realized someone was bearing down on him. He turned and saw a man stumbling up the snowy sidewalk towards him—plague victim. No doubt about it. The guy was trembling and quaking, clothes filthy with his own drainage. His face was pale and waxy, raining perspiration. He reached out with a sallow, shaking hand and Luke backed away.

“
Luke, Luke Barrows,” the guy said in a croaking dry voice that kept cracking. “It’s me…it’s Danny…Danny, your cousin.” He staggered past, found a bench and there he collapsed, his breathing ragged, his face so shiny it looked like it had been oiled with Wesson.

Danny was probably the only one in the family that had ever really, truly made anything of himself. He
’d gone to college, got his degree in accounting, and signed on with a firm downtown. Within five years he’d become a partner and within ten he’d bought his partner out. He had money, lots of it, but he’d never acted like it, Luke knew, not that it won him any favors around town. In small Midwestern towns like Wakefield people had an instinctive distrust of anyone with money, sort of a reverse snobbery.

Danny had brilliant green Irish eyes even though he was about as Irish as sauerkraut…but those eyes had faded and the light had been stolen from them.

Luke started to tell him that he hadn’t recognized him, but Danny wasn’t interested in any of that. “Listen to me, Luke. You’re not sick. You’re one of the lucky ones,” he said, looking up at him. “You have to find them. You have to seek them out and destroy them.”

“
Who?” Luke said, pretty well convinced that Danny’s mind was in no better state than his body.

“
The Carriers,” he said, panting and spitting out a clot of bloody phlegm into the snow. “The infected ones that come out at night. Find them. Drag them out of their hiding places. Destroy them. Burn the fucking town flat if you have to…it’s nothing but a pest-hole now. Do you hear me? Destroy them all…”

He ranted on and on and made very little sense and then he went into some kind of fit and ran off waving his hands above his head and crying out. That cry was answered by dozens of others who began to crawl from their hiding places, all shrieking and hopping in circles. And there was something very unsettling about that.

10

Once upon a time in the days of his youth, Luke had been a hospital corpsman in the Marines. He served with the 2
nd
Marine Division in Kuwait as a combat medic. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it, of course, so he was unofficially appointed the local medical counsel. There wasn’t much he could do and he absolutely hated the idea of leaving Sonja and Megan for even a few minutes, but he could hardly turn his back on his neighbors. The way he was figuring things, they were going to need each other now like never before.  It seemed on a daily basis he was called over to the Pruitts or the VanDannings, the Skorenskas or the Corbetts. And in the process, he’d had to pronounce six people dead in the last fifteen days—as if they needed him to do that.

His next door neighbor was Alger Stericki. They had a history of
territorial disputes,
as Luke had always called them. Alger was one of those fussy lawn zombies with nothing better to do than Weed-n-feed his grass and prune his bushes. He reported Luke for everything from not cutting his grass to the ramshackle gardening shed out back to Luke’s leaves blowing into his yard. Not that Luke was totally innocent in the war—he once taken a bag of leaves in the middle of night and dumped them on Alger’s porch.

The funny thing was they
’d become friends.

Ever since the plague started, again and again
Alger had turned to him. Especially since his wife, Anne, caught the germ two weeks before. Not a day went by when he was not knocking at Luke’s door.

About three days after Luke had seen the rats, Alger again came over.

He wanted Luke to look in on Anne, which he did. She was still breathing. Her pulse was a bit erratic. He gave her an injection and did what he could. Then Alger insisted he sit down and drink coffee. Which pretty much amounted to listening to him while he chain-smoked and trembled, his eyes stark and haunted.

“
When’s the last time you took a ride around this town?”

Luke told him he had better things to do. The people of
Wakefield were spread out through the neighborhoods of Main Street, Cherry Hill Road, the Grove, and Sewer Street…not to mention the subdivisions beyond. His only interest was here on 13
th
Street.

“
Listen, Luke,” he said between puffs on his Marlboro Red, “you’ve been watching over Sonja and Megan and the rest of us—and we appreciate that, we sure do—and you haven’t exactly gotten out of the house a lot. But things are happening. I think you better know about them.”

Alger was right on all fronts. Except for slipping out for groceries once or twice and getting medications filled at the hospital, all Luke knew about the world c
ame through the TV or over the Internet, and he was not ashamed of it.

“
Things have been going on, Luke. Bad things,” he said. “When was the last time you were over to the Crossik house?”

The Crossiks lived in a cute Victorian gingerbread house at the end of the block. They were nice people. What hadn
’t been nice was when Luke went over there two weeks before and had to tell them that their eight-year old son was dead. Pulling the blanket over his hollow-cheeked white face was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

He told Alger that he hadn
’t been over there since and he honestly felt bad about confessing it.